d if they, or any other ancient taverns of the legal quarter,
encouraged a more boisterous and reckless revelry than that which
constituted the ordinary course of business at the King's Head and the
Devil.

In his notes for Jan. 1681-2, Mr. Narcissus Luttrell observes--"The
13th, at night, some young gentlemen of the Temple went to the King's
Head Tavern, Chancery Lane, committing strange outrages there, breaking
windowes, &c., which the watch hearing of came to disperse them; but
they sending for severall of the watermen with halberts that attend
their comptroller of the revells, were engaged in a desperate riott, in
which one of the watchmen was run into the body and lies very ill; but
the watchmen secured one or two of the watermen." Eleven years later the
diarist records: "Jan. 5. One Batsill, a young gentleman of the Temple,
was committed to Newgate for wounding a captain at the Devil Tavern in
Fleet Street on Saturday last." Such ebullitions of manly
spirit--ebullitions pleasant enough to the humorist, but occasionally
productive of very disagreeable and embarrassing consequences--were not
uncommon in the neighborhood of the Inns of Court whilst the Christmas
revels were in progress.

A tempestuous, hot-blooded, irascible set were these gentlemen of the
law-colleges, more zealous for their own honor than careful for the
feelings of their neighbors. Alternately warring with sharp tongues,
sharp pens, and sharp swords they went on losing their tempers, friends,
and lives in the most gallant and picturesque manner imaginable. Here is
a nice little row which occurred in the Middle Temple Hall during the
days of good Queen Bess! "The records of the society," says Mr. Foss,
"preserve an account of the expulsion of a member, which is rendered
peculiarly interesting in consequence of the eminence to which the
delinquent afterwards attained as a statesman, a poet, and a lawyer.
Whilst the masters of the bench and other members of the society were
sitting quietly at dinner on February 9, 1597-8, John Davis came into
the hall with his hat on his head, and attended by two persons armed
with swords, and going up to the barrister's table, where Richard Martin
was sitting, he pulled out from under his gown a cudgel 'quem vulgariter
vocant a bastinado,' and struck him over the head repeatedly, and with
so much violence that the bastinado was shivered into many pieces. Then
retiring to the bottom of the hall, he drew one of his a